Things tagged with Practices and Habits

My current work at CakeDC allows me to be on IRC a lot – like all day. And while I’m often quite silent during the day, I do scan through a few PHP related channels and I’ve noticed a trend of PHP developers who just don’t get Javascript. Either they don’t have the experience, or they do have experience and think its icky.

I recently wrote an article about testing CakePHP controllers the hard way where I covered testing controllers by running their methods manually. I hinted at some additional tricks that could be performed by using Mock Objects. Today I’m going to spill the beans on Mocks, and how I use them when testing my Controllers.

Creating meaningful semantic HTML identifiers is something I always aim to do in my markup. I also thought this was something that other designers did as well. This past week I’ve found out just how wrong I was in that assumption.

By now you already know or should know about CakeTestCase::testAction() and the wondrous things it can do. However, testAction has a few shortcomings. It can’t handle redirects, it doesn’t let you use the power of Mocks, and its impossible to make assertions on object state changes. Sometimes you need to do things the hard way, stick your fingers in the mud and work it out.

At some point or another we’ve all had to make a data model that involved various flags to indicate different statuses / modes for an object. Often the schema for such a data model may end up looking like

Eclipse is widely popular, robust and powerful IDE. It supports PHP through the PDT project . PDT gives you some good PHP related development tools, including code completion & code templates to help you save some time.

I like many webdevelopers build a lot of forms. Forms are the bread and butter of web applications, and while making forms is getting easier for developers, users often still have a hard time with them. In these circumstances it is necessary to give them a help above and beyond ‘password’.

Creating gracefully degrading Javascript and CSS is pretty simple these days. I’m sure this has been written about a million times over as well. However, I thought it would be worthwhile to share how I do it as well. Mainly, because in addition to AJAX and effects I use Javascript as a way of enabling different CSS selectors for elements.

As I post more and more code here, I’m finding it tedious to update all the various .zip files of code as I make changes. So I’ve taken a page from Tim and Felix and made an account at gitHub. This makes it easy for me and you to find the newest revision of whatever you may be looking for.

When bakers first start using CakePHP there is a tendency to use requestAction() more often than it should be. Often requestAction() gets used to pull in common elements like recent posts or new comments, or to make menus. This makes sense in a way as it keeps the comments code in the CommentsController and all is well.

Mark is a designer and web-developer, working with standards compliant HTML and CSS. He has been building websites since 2000. Currently he is employed at Freshbooks as a developer, and actively contributes to open source projects specifically CakePHP. He uses this site as a place to share what he has learned and made.